“Reply to Sor Philotea”

by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

THE LITERARY WORK

A letter written by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in the Convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City; dated March 1, 1691 ; published posthumously in Spanish (as “Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz”) in 1700, in English in 1981.

SYNOPSIS

A defense of women’s right to study secular and religious texts, the “Reply to Sor Philothea” offers a unique look into the life and views of the most important writer of New Spain.

Events in History at the Time of the Letter

The Letter in Focus

For More Information

Juana Ramírez de Asbaje was born on the hacienda of San Miguel Nepantla, near Mexico City, the capital of New Spain, probably in 1648. The out-of-wedlock daughter of Isabel Ramirez de Santillana and Pedro Manuel de Asbaje y Vargas Machuca, the young Juana Inés was raised at the hacienda of her maternal grandfather Pedro Ramirez de Santillana, where she quickly demonstrated prodigious talents and exceptional intellectual ability. Upon her grandfather’s death in 1656 Juana’s mother sent her to live in Mexico City with her aunt, and in 1664 she became a lady-in-waiting to and protégée of the Viceroy’s wife, doña Leonor María Carreto, the Marquise de Mancera. Although she enjoyed many favors during her life at court, after five years she joined the Carmelite convent in Mexico City, which she was forced to leave for reasons of ill health. Once recuperated, she entered the Convent of San Jerónimo in 1668 where she professed on February 24, 1669, under the religious name Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. A collection of her poetry, Inundation Castálida (Castalian Inundation), was published in Spain in 1689. According to many scholars, Sor Juana, who became known as the “Mexican Phoenix” and “Tenth Muse,” was the greatest poet of the Spanish language in this era. Her death from the plague on April 17, 1695, contributed to the demise of the Baroque era in Spanish-American literature. In addition to sonnets and many other types of verse, Sor Juana penned several plays (dealing with both the religious and the mundane), composed songs, and wrote prose that was revolutionary for the time, such as her “Reply to Sor Philothea.”

Events in History at the Time of the Letter

The Baroque in Latin America

From the middle of the sixteenth century until the end of the seventeenth century, first in Italy, Germany, and Holland, and then in Spain and its American colonies, “the Baroque” was the dominant style in the creative arts. The Baroque is characterized by ideological, semantic, and syntactic asymmetry. Other features are extravagance, intricacy, and a sense of artificiality—in contrast to the art of the Renaissance, which it followed chronologically and which strove for harmony, order, and verisimilitude. Some historians see the Baroque period in art as a direct response to unsettling pan-European events such as the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, and to scientific discoveries, predominantly in astronomy, that unseated traditional ideas of knowledge and reality.

Baroque literary works generally have a dynamic form and an indeterminate vision of reality; they are objects in constant transformation. Unlike the Renaissance ideal, which strove to closely represent reality, Baroque works tend to hide an intellectual mystery that must be revealed; as such, the Baroque may be considered the art of that which is unfinished. As the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes (see The Death of Artemio Cruz , also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times) observes, the great distances between the promises and realities of the Renaissance are filled by the Baroque (Fuentes, p. 206; trans. M. Schuessler). The Baroque also juxtaposed different media—architecture and landscape, painting and poetry, music and theatre—creating a multifaceted, kaleidoscopic, and splendid artistic whole.

El desengaño

In literature, and especially in poetry, the Spanish Baroque’s distinguished trait is that of the desengaño, that is, the sudden realization that what one sees or believes is not necessarily real or true. Desengaño is the psychological state produced upon uncovering this shell of illusion and deceit (Wardropper, p. 6). As appearances continually deceive us, the corollary of desengaño is the admission that the world is irrational—the unjust govern the just, and evil triumphs over good (Wardropper, p. 6). Carlos Fuentes sees desengaño illustrated in the enormous distances between the Utopian ideal and historical reality, the noble savage and the incarcerated slave, the idea of law and the way it is enforced, the ancient gods and the modern one—all of which create a desperate feeling of emptiness that is filled by the Baroque (Fuentes, pp. 205-24). In Latin America, the Baroque enjoyed a full and original adoption, due, perhaps, to the strange political and cultural relationship between native and European civilizations there, along with the natural exuberance of the American environment: its enormous rivers, impenetrable jungles, never-before-imagined animals, and birds of resplendent plumage. This is seen clearly in the architecture of Latin America’s colonies, which was carried to extraordinarily original extremes. The churches of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Santa Maria Tonanzintla in Puebla, Mexico, are examples of an esthetic hybrid, in keeping with a continent in which the biological mixing of races produced the mestizo, or individual of mixed American Indian-European heritage. Sor Juana demonstrates such an influence in the abundance of indigenous terms throughout her writing, especially those referring to native delicacies; in one of her dramatic compositions, she even includes a tocotin; (Indian dance form), accompanied by the words of this ritual written in the Náhuatl language.

The epoch was one of great contradictions and Sor Juana may be considered their embodiment: she was both religious and pagan, a woman and an intellectual, scholastic and hermetic, a nun and scholar. Such paradoxes helped to set what Octavio Paz has called the “traps of faith,” in which Sor Juana became ensnared towards the end of her life (Paz, p. 387). Although claiming to want no trouble with the Holy Office, she nonetheless exceeded the established limitations of the epoch. Sor Juana became ensnared because she applied herself to secular investigations while openly opposing the religious hierarchy of her time.

The convent

In seventeenth-century New Spain, there were two principal career paths for middle and upper-class criolla women (Spanish American woman of European descent). The first and most common was that of a wife and mother; the second—less common—was that of a nun.

According to the Italian traveler Antonio Gemelli Carreri, there were 29 religious communities of monks and 22 of nuns in the capital of New Spain at the end of the seventeenth century (Paz, p. 117). Sor Juana believed—mistakenly—that the convent’s atmosphere of peace and calm would allow her to dedicate all her time to intellectual and literary endeavors.

In the convent of San Jerónimo, Sor Juana lived a restricted existence. She was not allowed to leave the community’s premises, although she had daily contact with the outside through the locutorium (from the Latin loquor, “I speak”), a room in the convent where the nuns were allowed to receive their relatives and friends—with their faces veiled, and protected from their visitors by a metal screen. In this space Sor Juana conversed daily with her learned friend the university professor Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora about intellectual and scientific matters, and received visits from her beloved friends and protectors, the two Vicereines—Lenor Maria Carreto, the Marquise de Mancera, and María Luisa Manrique de Lara, the Marquise de la Laguna and Countess of Paredes.

Although one might believe that austerity ruled within the world of the convent, Sor Juana lived in relative comfort. Her cell was actually a kind of two-level apartment, complete with a maid. In her spare time, in the privacy of her quarters, Sor Juana was able to read from her extensive library—said to contain more than 5,000 volumes—study the stars and the movements of the heavens with her astronomical instruments, compose poetry and drama, play her musical instruments, and engage in an extensive correspondence, most of it lost to time.

The “Letter Worthy of Athena”: crucial context

The “Reply to Sor Philothea” was written in response to a disconcerting missive sent to the author by the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, who used the traditional female pseudonym of Sor Philothea (in Greek, philothea means “love of God”) to admonish the poet for her apparent lack of religious devotion, as evidenced by her excessive interest in the study of earthly matters.

TIMETABLE OF EVENTS LEADING TO THE WRITING OF THE “REPLY”

In order to better understand the content of Sor Juana’s “Reply,” it is necessary to review a series of events that began with the publication, during the last days of November, 1690, of a pamphlet entitled “Letter Worthy of Athena by Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Professed Nun in the Most Spiritual Convent of San Jerónimo. … Printed and Dedicated to That Same Sister by Sister Philothea de la Cruz, Her Studious Follower in the Convent of the Most Holy Trinity in Puebla de Los Angeles.” The reference to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, reflects the effusive—if not entirely sincere—praise being showered upon its author by Sor Philothea. Essentially, the “Letter Worthy of Athena” is a superbly reasoned critique by Sor Juana of a sermon given some 40 years before by a highly respected Portuguese Jesuit, Antonio Vieyra, in which he presents his interpretation of a phrase attributed to Christ in the gospel of John: “A new commandment I give unto you: that you love one another as I have loved you.” In Sor Juana’s opinion, Christ’s love differs from that of humans, who wish love to be returned for their own sakes. Christ wishes to be loved not for his sake but for the sake of others, that is, for the sake of the people who love him. It follows, as Sor Juana saw it, that Christ desires a person to love others for his or her own sake, not for the return love it might bring. This contradicts the opinion set forth by Father Vieyra.

THE CATHOLIC PRINCES OF NEW SPAIN

Sor Juana’s fate was determined by her difficult relationship with three important figures of New Spain’s religious hierarchy: the misogynist Francisco de Aguiar y Seîjas, Archbishop of Mexico, whose religious fervor included bodily mutilation and other excesses Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, Bishop of Puebla, the person who incited Sor Juana to write the polemic “Letter Worthy of Athena” that sparked the events that led to the “Reply”; and Antonio Núñez de Miranda, her spiritual advisor and confessor, who personalty instigated Sor Juana’s entry into the Hieronymite convent and, on the eve of her profession, lit the candles on the church’s altar. He would abandon his spiritual daughter after die composition of her “Reply,”’ leaving her in the hands of the two aforementioned bishops. Physically and morally weakened by their actions and reactions, Sor Juana became more vulnerable to the pestilence that swept Mexico City the year of her death.

Although Sor Juana claims that she was asked to write the critique of Vieyra’s sermon by a high-ranking religious authority (generally accepted to be Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz), she does not miss the opportunity to express her own premonitions regarding the negative impact her critique would soon have on its readers, all of them male and many of them members of the Society of Jesus, such as the misogynist Archbishop of Mexico, Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas. In the words of Octavio Paz:

It is not difficult to deduce from all this that the person who might feel affected by Sor Juana’s critique was not Vieyra, absent and far removed from it all, but Archbishop Francisco Aguiar y Seijas. An attack on Vieyra was an oblique attack on Aguiar. It was also a confrontation with influential friends of the Archbishop.

(Paz, p. 402)

This is clearly evidenced in a fragment of the letter in which Sor Juana appears to foresee its negative reception, but nonetheless insists on her argumentative ability, even though she is a woman: “It is no faint chastisement, for one who believed there was no man who dared reply to him, to see that an arrogant woman dares, one for whom study of this nature is so foreign, and so remote from her gender.” (Sor Juana in Paz, p. 391).

Not surprisingly, Sor Juana’s letter set off widespread criticism and debate, both in America and Europe, as it was seen as a veiled attempt to attack the theology of the Jesuits, the most powerful religious order in seventeenth-century New Spain. According to Octavio Paz, Sor Juana would be destroyed in the struggle between two princes of the Roman Catholic Church: Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, the Bishop of Puebla, and his rival the Jesuit Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas (Paz, p. 403). In order to mask his role in prompting her to write the initial letter, the Bishop of Puebla represents himself as “Sor Philothea” when he chastises Sor Juana for the ideas expounded in the “Letter Worthy of Athena.” His brief missive precedes Sor Juana’s text, and starts with high praise: “[I]n spite of the fact that in his sermon Vieyra had soared ‘above himself like a second Eagle of the Apocalypse,’ Sor Juana had ‘sharpened her quill to a finer point,’ and the Portuguese scholar could ‘glory in seeing himself refuted by a woman who is the honor of her sex’” (Sor Philotea in Paz, p. 396). After praising Sor Juana’s intellect and calling her “the honor of her sex,” Sor Philothea proceeds to admonish Sor Juana for not applying such a privileged (and God-given) intellect to the pursuit of religious knowledge:

Any science that does not light the way to Salvation God regards as foolishness… . What a pity that such a great intellect should so lower itself by unworthy notice of the Earth as to have no desire to penetrate what comes to pass in Heaven; and, having already stooped to the Earth, may it not descend farther to consider what comes to pass in Hell.

(Sor Philotea in Paz, p. 396)

This chastisement triggers Sor Juana’s “Reply to Sor Philothea de la Cruz,” in which she argues, based upon her own life experience and that of other women in history, that women have the right and ability to learn. Essentially, the “Reply” is a self-defense of the author’s life and her interest in intellectual matters generally consigned to the public, masculine sphere. In it Sor Juana also explains that in order to understand theology, the “queen of sciences,” it is necessary to comprehend all of the lesser, worldly sciences. She cites numerous examples of Catholic saints, such as St. Augustine and St. Jerome—the patron saint of her order—who found their way to Heaven precisely through the concerted study of the mysteries of life on Earth. Indeed, the fourth-century St. Jerome himself was a literary scholar, who dedicated his life to the translation of the Bible into Latin, producing the Vulgate, which became for centuries the cornerstone of Catholic liturgy. Ironically, St. Jerome battled famously with his love for secular literature, especially the works of Cicero—and eventually renounced all literature that was not sacred.

The Letter in Focus

Contents summary—pre-convent days

“The Reply to Sor Philotea” begins with Sor Juana explaining why her response to Sor Philothea has been delayed as long as it has. She claims that she has not known how to reply to “your most learned, prudent, pious, and loving letter” (Sor Juana, “Reply to Sor Philotea,” p. 205), or how to thank Philothea for publishing her original work, the “Letter Worthy of Athena.” According to Sor Juana, the publication of this letter was unforeseen by her, and had disconcerted and shocked her:

It is no affectation of modesty on my part, Madam, but the simple truth of my entire soul, to say that when the letter that you chose to call Athenagoric [“worthy of Athena”] came into my hands, I burst into tears of embarrassment, something I do not very easily do.

(“Reply,” p. 206)

Regarding Sor Philothea’s chastisement of her intellectual activity, Sor Juana explains that she has been reluctant to write about sacred subjects, not because she does not wish to, but because she feels herself to be unworthy.

Sor Juana next turns to the story of her life, beginning with her inclination to write:

From my first glimmers of reason, my inclination to letters was of such power and vehemence, that neither the reprimands of others—and I have received many—nor my own considerations—and there have been not a few of these—have succeeded in making me abandon this natural impulse which God has implanted in me.

(“Reply,” p. 210)

Before she was three years old, she had learned to read by accompanying her elder sister to class. She also recalls that, as a child, “I refrained from eating cheese, because someone had told me it made you stupid, and my urge to learn was stronger than my wish to eat, powerful as this is in children” (“Reply,” p. 211). When she was six or seven, young Juana discovered that in Mexico City there was a university where one could study many different things. She begged her mother to dress her as a boy in order that she might attend. Her request was, not surprisingly, denied, and she returned to her self-directed study of the books in her grandfather’s library. After she arrived in Mexico City, where she lived with her maternal aunt, “people were astonished, not so much at my intelligence as at the memory and store of knowledge I had at an age at which it would seem I had scarcely had time to learn to speak” (“Reply”, p. 211).

So assiduous was the young Juana in her studies and so uncanny her abilities, that she claims to have learned Latin in less than 20 lessons. She confesses that she was so studious that, at an age

A CURIOUS COMPETITION

Upon her incorporation into the Viceregal court as a lady-in-waiting to the Vicerreme, Doña Leonor Carreto, Marquise de Mancera, Juana Inés’s extraordinary knowledge was put to the test in a meeting organized by the Viceroy Don Antonio Sebastián de Toledo, which was attended by forty of the most famous academicians, theologians, and philosophers of the day. Sor Juana’s first biographer, the Jesuit Diego Calleja, recounts this episode from her early years at court:

The honorable Marquis de Mancara … wanted to ascertain the truth and to learn whether such amazing wisdom was innate or acquired .., and so he gathered together one day in his palace all the men of letters in the university and city of Mexico. They numbered some forty, of varied professions, such as theologians, scripturists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, poets, humanists …So on the appointed day they gathered for this curious and remarkable competition, and the honorable Marquis testifies that the human mind cannot conceive what he witnessed, for he says that “in the manner that a royal galleon … might fend off the attacks of a few canoes, so did Juana extricate herself from the questions, arguments, and objections these many men, each in his specialty, directed to her”’

(Calleja in Paz, p, 98)

when most young women were very self-conscious about their hair and how it was arranged, she habitually cut hers off:

I used to cut four or five fingers’ width from mine, keeping track of how far it had formerly reached, and making it my rule that if by the time it grew back to that point, I did not know such-and-such a thing which I had set out to learn as it grew, I would cut it again as a penalty for my dullness … for I did not consider it right that a head so bare of knowledge should be dressed with hair, knowledge being the more desirable ornament.

(“Reply,” pp. 211-12)

Contents summary—convent life

Sor Juana Inés confesses that her entry into the convent was due more to necessity than divine inspiration. As an out-of-wedlock daughter of a poor criolla family, her hopes for a good marriage were not promising. The fact that her own mother never married and her experiences growing up with half-brothers and half-sisters may also have shaped her negative view of married life. She confesses that various aspects of convent life repelled her; she desired to live alone, in peace, and to have no other occupation than studying. Just the same, becoming a nun seemed the “least unreasonable and most becoming choice” she could make, given how little marriage interested—or was possible for—her (“Reply,” p. 212). She discovered, once she had taken her vows, that the convent, which kept her from studying her books whenever she liked, only increased her zeal to learn. In fact, says Sor Juana, this desire “exploded like gunpowder” (“Reply,” p. 212). Sor Juana’s intellectual appetite was voracious, as she reveals upon attempting to excuse her forays into non-sacred learning:

I went on, continually directing the course of my study… toward the eminence of sacred theology. To reach this goal, I considered it necessary to ascend the steps of human arts and sciences, for how can one who has not mastered the style of the ancillary branches of learning hope to understand that of the queen of them all?

(“Reply,” p. 213)

She backs up her argument by presenting examples in which a lack of worldly knowledge would render impossible the interpretation and appreciation of religious texts.

In the same vein, Sor Juana also laments that she never had a teacher during the long hours of her self-directed and isolated study and that her studies were interrupted by her duties at the convent, where she was treasurer and archivist for many years, as well as by the daily distractions of convent life—quarrels between servants, the idle chatter of fellow sisters, and the well-intentioned visits of friends. She also mentions the jealousy and wrath brought about by her literary acclaim. Such jealousy “has even gone so far as a formal request that study be forbidden me” (“Reply,” p. 224). Indeed this did occur at least once during the years Sor Juana spent at the convent of San Jerónimo. An overzealous female prelate succeeded in prohibiting Sor Juana from consulting her books during the three months that the individual resided at the convent. However, even such insistence by a figure of authority couldn’t stop her natural inclinations: “[A]lthough I did not study from books, I did from everything God has created, all of it being my letters, and all this universal chain of being my book” (“Reply, “p. 224). She observed the pattern traced on the ground by a top, and discovered many secrets of nature while in the kitchen, noting how an egg keeps together when fried in oil but disintegrates in syrup, wryly pointing out that “if Aristotle had been a cook, he would have written much more” (“Reply,” p. 226). In other words, though deprived of her books, she probably learned as much by observing phenomena in the kitchen as she had from studying books.

As proof that other women scored achievements outside the domestic sphere, Sor Juana enumerates examples of the many learned women who played decisive roles in biblical history: Deborah, who drew up military and political laws; the Queen of Sheba, who dared to challenge the wisdom of the wisest and who became the judge of nonbelievers; Abigail, who held the gift of prophecy; and Esther, who was blessed with a supreme persuasiveness, among many others. After her discussion of Hebraic heroic figures, she recalls those of the Ancients: the mythological sibyls, curiously described as “chosen by God to prophesy the principal mysteries of our faith”; the Roman goddess of wisdom, Minerva; the Roman poet Lucan’s wife, Polla Argentaria, who reportedly helped her husband with the correction of his epic, Pharsalia; and the oracle Nicostrata, held by some to have invented Latin letters (“Reply,” p. 227). Sor Juana ends her compendium by mentioning an influential and admired woman of her own time: Christina Alexandra, Queen of Sweden, who had famously converted to Catholicism in the mid-seventeenth century, and who was deeply interested in the arts and sciences.

Having liberally demonstrated the invaluable role of women throughout history, Sor Juana turns to another question: should women be prohibited from study? According to her argument, the idea that they should is based upon a historical misinterpretation of a phrase in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “Let women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted them to speak” (1 Cor. 14:34). Sor Juana concludes that Paul means that women should not lecture publicly, nor should they preach. Studying, writing, and teaching privately, however, are not only permissible, but are in fact desirable. Of course this is only the case of a select few, because not everyone is worthy of such a pursuit, not even men:

[T]he interpretation of Holy Scripture should be forbidden not only to women, considered so very inept, but to men, who merely by virtue of being men consider themselves sages, unless they are very learned and virtuous, with receptive and properly trained minds.

(“Reply,” p. 230)

Practically, too, educating women makes sense: learned older women would become the instructors for the younger female generation, thus avoiding the “dangerous medium of male masters” (“Reply,” p. 233).

Towards the end of her “Reply,” Sor Juana returns to the ill-fated “Letter Worthy of Athena” that landed her in such trouble. Sor Juana challenges Sor Philothea/de Santa Cruz to answer a series of succinct questions that go to the heart of the theological and political stakes behind their fraught correspondence:

If the crime is the Athenagoric Letter, was there anything more to that than simply setting forth my views without exceeding the limits our Holy Mother Church allows? If she with her most holy authority does not forbid my doing so, why should others forbid it? Was holding an opinion contrary to Vieyra an act of boldness on my part, and not [his] holding one opposing the three holy Church Fathers [Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Chrysostom]? Is not my mind, such as it is, as free as his, considering their common origin? Is his opinion one of the revealed precepts of Holy Faith, that we should have to believe it blindly?

(“Reply,” pp. 236-37)

Sor Juana ends her “Reply” by promising that anything she writes in the future will “ever seek sanctuary at your feet and safety through your correction” (“Reply,” p. 243). In this way, although the nun offers to present her works to the Bishop’s censor, she does not, in fact, agree to give up her studies and composition entirely. Nonetheless, the furor caused by her “Reply” was so great that she abjured secular pursuits, such as writing verse and reading nonreligious texts, and devoted herself entirely to the care of the ill in 1692.

As a postscript, recent scholarly research has found documentation that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz did eventually return to her intellectual pursuits. Indeed, she had begun to rebuild her library and replace her scientific instruments, sold at the command of her clerical superiors, before her death in 1695.

Literary context

The “Reply to Sor Philothea” occupies an important position in the development of literature in Spanish, and of women’s literature in general: “[T]he document is an impassioned, carefully reasoned, occasionally pedantic, defense of the historical and spiritual rights of women to study, to teach, and to write” (Peden in de la Cruz, Poems, p. 7). It is furthermore one of the first such defenses in the Western hemisphere. The sociohistorical and autobiographical content of the “Reply” gives us a glimpse into the world of seventeenth-century New Spain, and serves as a compendium of the knowledge—philosophical, historical, scientific, and otherwise—of the age. The “Reply” also illuminates many obscure passages in Sor Juana’s literary production, and is an invaluable resource for interpreting such lyric masterpieces as the First Dream, as well as some of her dramatic and prose pieces. The only truly self-descriptive text by Sor Juana, it helps explain, for example, the wide scope of her learning, which came not from the convent but rather from her early readings of the many books in her grandfather’s library.

Impact

The “Reply to Sor Philothea” was not published until 1700, when it was included in the anthology entitled Fama y obras postumas (Fame and Posthumous Works) and received no attention from literary critics for 200 years. We do know that Bishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz did not deem Sor Juana’s defense worthy of reply, as, according to Octavio Paz, “the Bishop of Puebla could not have been happy with her response; he had wanted a frank and unequivocal renunciation of secular letters, not a reasoned defense” (Paz, p. 426). Indeed, in 1692 Sor Juana was forced to give up her books and musical and scientific instruments, which were auctioned off by Bishop Aguiar y Seijas in order to raise money for the poor. This was followed two years later by a statement of self-condemnation, which she signed in her own blood. She denied that she had existed before becoming a nun, defended with her blood the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception (which states that the Virgin Mary was begotten without sin), and turned to penance and self-sacrifice. Several months before her death she had written in the convent’s Book of Professions:

In this place is to be noted the day, month, and year of my death. For the love of God and his Most Holy Mother, I entreat my beloved sisters the nuns, who are here now and who shall be in the future, to commend me to God, for I have been and am the worst among them. Of them I ask forgiveness, for the love of God and his Mother. I, worst of the world, Juana Inés de la Cruz.

(Sor Juana in Paz, pp. 464-65)

Since the mid-twentieth century, a time of controversy and renewed progress in the global arena of woman’s rights, hundreds of books and articles have been written on Sor Juana’s literary work. One of the pioneer scholars of this renewed interest and celebration of the life and works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dorothy Schons, considers Sor Juana “the first feminist of America,” an epithet justified by her “Reply” (Schons in Paz, p. 486).

—Michael Schuessler

For More Information

Fuentes, Carlos. El espejo enterrado. Mexico City:Fondo de Cultura Econòmica, 1994.

Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sister. “The Reply to Sor Philotea.” In A Sor Juana Anthology. Trans. Alan Trueblood. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

_____. Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings/SorJuana Inés de la Cruz. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York: Penguin, 1997.

_____. The Answer/ha respuesta. Including a Selection of Poems. Critical edition. Trans. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. New York: CUNY, The Feminist Press, 1994.

Menim, Stephanie, ed. Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.

Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana or The Traps of Faith. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1988.

War dropper, Bruce. “Temas y problemas del barroco español.” In Historia critica de la literatura española. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1991.